


If You're Looking For Someone (To Write Your Breakup Songs About)

by Pollydoodles



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 13:03:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8490823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pollydoodles/pseuds/Pollydoodles
Summary: Steve Rogers is a shitty boyfriend. And Darcy Lewis is - finally - going to do something about that.





	

“You are a shitty boyfriend, Steve Rogers.”

 

“Darce…” he said, with a sigh from the end of the phone. There was a pause, a long enough pause to let her know in no uncertain terms that he wasn't actually going any further. 

 

She snorted to herself, even against the hot flush of tears that gathered in her eyes and threatened to spill down her cheeks, that even though - as usual - Steve had nothing to say, he still managed to tell her everything. 

 

“Do you even want this?” She asked, quiet down the receiver. Restless fingers tangled in the phone cord as she waited on him to answer, the ancient handset bequeathed to her by Jane because Darcy Lewis could barely afford the sugar in her coffee, let alone fancy things like a telephone that wasn’t third hand and had peaked technology-wise three decades previous. “Do you even want me?”

 

Another long pause, one that encompassed the entire span of the world and back again as far as Darcy was concerned. She bit down hard into her lower lip and fought hard not to scream at him. Losing it, letting go of the fraying ends of her temper, would not help her cause or her sanity. 

 

“Well,” she said stiffly, voice clipped as she spoke into the void that stretched between them. “Pretty sure that tells me everything I need to know.”

 

“Darcy-”

 

“What, Steve?” She snapped, left hand hovering over the telephone hook, ready to depress it and cut him off straight off. Leave him hanging as he’d been managed to do to her for months. “I mean so little to you that you can't fight for this?”

 

He sighed again, breath washing heavy into Darcy's ear, sound so deep that it was almost as though he were actually standing next to her. She huffed, frustrated that he couldn't just come out with whatever was clearly on his mind. Or actually come to her. He was able to drop everything and fly to the other side of the world if someone else was in trouble. 

 

“I don't know what to say to you.”

 

Steve’s voice sounded almost as though it were verging on defeat, as though she were the one causing problems. Darcy felt a fire ignite in her chest and swallowed hard to beat it back, despite the way it fizzed through her veins and made her tremble with anger. She closed her eyes and breathed out, breathed out all the angry, snappish things that bubbled in the back of her throat and would, if she said them, shut him off even further. 

 

Darcy dug her nails into the soft palm of her hand, feeling the biting sting of them ground her, and let her shoulders relax before she mustered the courage to speak again. When she did, it was in a measured, even tone that sounded unnatural as hell to her. 

 

“Don't you think that, if this meant to you what it means to me, you would?”

 

Another pause, shorted this time by a huffing sigh that sounded for all the world that he was frustrated. Frustrated - she almost snorted - with her. As though she were having this conversation for the sake of it, just for the drama. Something to fill in the time - Darcy bit down hard on her lip to stop herself from shouting at him down the crackling phone line. 

 

“You know I want to be with you.”

 

“Do I?” She laughed despite herself, the sound spilling out of her even through the fortified walls of her careful control, in utter disbelief. “You don't tell me that, Steve,” she said, shaking her head as though he could see her do it. “You're not actually telling me now in fact, you're using it as an argument.”

 

“Look, Darcy, I don’t have time for this-”

 

“What you mean,” the words lashed out over him, over whatever crap he was about to come out with, the last of her self-control and measured argument severing with his words. “What you mean, Steve-” she wielded his name like a weapon, emphasising it as she spoke. “-is that you don’t have time for us.”

 

Darcy sucked in a breath, a tiny sliver of herself wishing that she could suck back the words she’d just spat out at him, the rest of her standing to the sideline and cheering herself on for finally saying what she’d been thinking for too long. For his part, Steve was silent at the other end of the line. 

 

She clenched her free hand into a fist, the one that wasn’t clutching at the phone receiver so hard she could practically hear the ancient plastic squeak under her grip, and closed her eyes as she fought once more to regain herself. Darcy resolutely did not dwell on the fact that Steve did not immediately jump to correct her assertion. 

“You spend your whole life fighting, Steve,” she said quietly, forcing out the words in an even tone, and hoping he understood the effort it took her to do it. “Every damn day. And you have this fierce burning internal flame that keeps you doing it, because you won't rest until you've done what you believe is the right thing.”

 

“It's part of why I love you,” she said frankly, and he managed a small noise of what might have been surprise at that. Darcy rushed on, not letting him speak. It might not have been the ideal first time to tell him that she loved him, but she was fast losing sight of why it was such a good thing. “But it also tells me you don't care enough about us.”

 

“I do,” he said heavily, but not in a way that spoke of him trying to convince her. Just in the manner of a man who was trying to extricate himself from a difficult conversation. A man who was wishing he was anywhere else at that moment. 

 

“Not enough,” Darcy snapped, then caught herself as she danced on the very edge of the abyss, a treacherous single tear falling hot and fast down her cheek. The sharp salt of it burned over her pale skin and she swallowed back the sob that threatened to follow it with a vicious motion. She would not let him hear her cry. 

 

“Not enough.”

 

She repeated it, with a finality that surprised even her as she said it. There was, perhaps typically, silence on the other end of the phone. Darcy wondered briefly if he was even still there - the dial tone wasn’t buzzing in her ear, but he might well have just laid the receiver down and left it there, rocking gently from side to side and the tinny speaker letting an empty room know that she, Darcy Lewis, was done with him. 

 

“I’ve got to go,” came his answer, such as it was, awkward and stilted. Darcy resisted the strong urge to throw the phone across the room and instead sucked in a huge breath that filled her lungs and cleared her head. 

 

“Go,” she said, defeated. “I’m done, okay? I’m done with us. With you. With whatever shitty reason you’re gonna come up with, and I’m definitely done with the silence you’ll give me when I finish speaking. So I’m not going to listen to it.”

 

With that, she hung up the phone. 

 

\-------

 

“I’m fine.” Darcy said to Jane as the other girl looked up and winced. Darcy sniffed to herself, sliding in through the lab door quietly and resolutely did not look down at what she was wearing. She was well aware that none of it remotely matched and, if she were being honest with herself, was barely a step above actual sleep wear. 

 

At least she hadn’t lost her breakfast down her sweater. If only because she’d not been able to bring herself to contemplate breakfast. That wasn’t something she was intending to mention to Jane, who when not nose-deep in science could be quite the mother hen. 

 

“Hey, you really don’t have to be here today, Darce-” Jane began, and Darcy shook her head violently, all but throwing her bag off her shoulder onto the desk immediately in front of her. 

 

“Yes, I really do,” She snapped back obstinately. “There’s no way I am letting Steve fucking Rogers affect any other part of my life.” 

 

Jane sucked in a breath, held it for a moment and then released it slowly, opting wisely as she looked at the girl in front of her with the pinked cheeks and the unbrushed hair tumbling over her shoulders, to let it go. She nodded silently instead, and indicated the chair opposite, into which Darcy let herself flop.

 

Hours passed, in which Jane’s work made less and less sense to Darcy. She squinted at the scrawled writing in front of her, frustrated unreasonably at the way Jane’s spidery notes curled in the wrong directions across the page. The tickle of irritation crept up Darcy’s back and set her shoulders hunching as she bent over the table and growled at the papers in front of her. 

 

Jane glanced across at her from the other table, pausing momentarily in her work, and Darcy rubbed at her forehead hard in an effort to scrub away the unfair thoughts that flit across her mind. She huffed to herself and traced a finger along the inked notes, reading and re-reading the same line until it made even less sense than it had done the first time. 

 

Her fingers tensed, tempted to bundle it all up into a scrunched ball and toss it in the waste paper basket. Her left eye twitched, the eyelid throbbing erratically to tell her - as if she didn’t already know, as if she hadn’t spent the night pacing her tiny apartment and muttering all the things she hadn’t said - that she was dog tired and in no way fit for work. 

 

The tiny apartment that, despite her rising anger and the overwhelming sadness, had too many memories of Steve Rogers. The kitchen counter that they’d eaten takeaway on too many times, him arriving late to her door with an apologetic smile and a little white plastic carrier bag of appeasement. The kitchen table, which he’d found her at asleep so many times, determined to wait up for him, no matter the hour. The cheap bed, the only one she’d been able to afford with its slightly wonky left hand side. It had barely been built to withstand regular adults, let alone super soldiers who tended to drop into it like a lead weight after a mission. 

 

God, she was not looking forward to dragging herself home to those sad four walls, crammed with disappointment and bittersweet memories. 

 

The itch of frustration, the wholly unfair tense feeling that wound around the base of her spine and edged its way up and up and up until- 

 

“I’m going for coffee,” Darcy mumbled, wrapping her cardigan more firmly around her, the sleeves too long and pulled out of shape after too many years of use. It covered her hands and hit her around mid-thigh, swamping her and making an already petite frame look even smaller. She slunk out of the lab, pausing only to shrug on her shoulder bag. 

 

Darcy resolutely did not look back at Jane as she left. She did not need to see the splash of pity spread across her friend’s face. 

 

She stood in line in the Starbucks on the corner, mulishly avoiding the independent coffee shop that sat opposite. In truth, she had come to prefer the taste across of the little shop across the street, but it had been Steve’s find and Darcy found that even glancing over the cheery hand-written chalkboard in the middle of the pavement outside the front door made her a little queasy. 

 

“Can I interest you in our Captain America special?”

 

Darcy’s attention snapped toward the barista. He was young, college-aged, maybe just a few years younger than herself. The dark circles around his own eyes matched hers. She blinked, brain rebooting itself and firing up again. 

 

“Your what now?”

 

He sighed, heavily, with half an eye on the line behind her, before repeating himself. Darcy closed her eyes at his words, opening them again and finding herself face to face with what she’d managed to miss before - a near life size chalk rendering of Steve on their specials board, resplendent in full uniform and shield. 

 

She stared at it, feeling a mix of sadness and pure rage bubbling equally within her. 

 

“It’s iced?” The barista offered, looking between Darcy, the ever increasing line of people behind her and the chalkboard. She shook her head dumbly, fingers picking at the edges of the too-large sweater she was wearing, and suddenly felt sick to her stomach. She ducked out of line and pushed her way through the queue, breaking through the mass of people who muttered and tutted in her direction, and with both palms on the glass of the door. 

 

Darcy broke onto the pavement as though she were breaking the surface of water to once again taste the air she needed to live. Catching at her breath, she wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head. 

 

She started walking. 

 

\--------

 

“Darce?”

 

She raised her head slightly, hair mussed and sweater askew, to find Barton looking down at her with concern. Darcy sniffed loudly and shoved her hair back from her face, not so subtly rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand as she moved. She’d parked herself on a wooden bench not far from the tower, knees drawn up to her chest with her chin resting on them. 

 

“You okay, kid?” He asked, words slow and deliberate, because they both knew she was a total wreck, no matter what she happened to tell him next. Darcy sniffed again, and hiccuped loudly, before nodding. Barton sighed and sank down onto the bench next to her. 

 

They sat in something of a companionable silence, Darcy snuffling into her sweater sleeves and Barton staring stoically ahead of him and resolutely not looking at her as she wiped red-rimmed eyes on the frayed ends of her sweater. 

 

“You know,” he began, voice conversational as he sat with hands laced together loosely in his lap and still staring fixedly at the bus stop across from them. “I could really use a flatmate. I’m not always there, and Lucky could use someone who’s gonna be there most of the time.”

 

Darcy turned her head to him, eyes still glassy with the last shades of tears shed, despite her best attempts at concealing it. She gave an inquisitory sniff, and Barton nodded in silent reply, still gazing ahead at the bus stop where a small line of people had gathered. 

 

“Yep,” he said. “A flatmate is just about what I need right now.”

 

\-------

 

“I’ll be honest, I was expecting more stuff,” Barton said, scratching the back of his head as he opened the door the following day to find Darcy clutching at a cardboard box. It sagged at the sides but even so it was pitifully small and barely full. The little brunette shrugged at him from behind the box, and he stepped aside to let her in. 

 

“I don’t really have a whole lot of stuff,” Darcy said by way of explanation, wandering past him and feeling Lucky nudge at her knees with a wet nose, before plonking his fat ass on her foot. With some difficulty, she shifted her box onto one hip and bent to scratch at his ears. The dog leaned into her gratefully, resting his whole weight back against her legs. 

 

“Not a problem,” Barton said cheerfully. “Your room’s this way.”

 

Barton’s spare bedroom was just across the hall from his, and next to the bathroom. 

 

“The pipes groan a bit at night,” he said apologetically as she dumped the box on the bed and gazed around her. The room was small, but well-appointed, and Darcy schooled her face out of the expression of surprise that Barton had decent taste in wallpaper before she turned back to him. 

 

“It’s great,” she said honestly, conjuring up a small smile from the depleted reserves she had in stock. Barton sent her back a look that was a little too knowing, one that told her he understood how much of a face she was slapping on the situation. Darcy shifted from one foot to the other, awkward and a little shy under his gaze. 

 

“You want some pizza?” He offered, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the vague direction of the kitchen. Darcy smiled and shook her head. “Okay,” Barton nodded, backing up until he was practically in the corridor whilst still talking. “I’ll let you get settled in. Just holler if you need anything.”

 

With that, he disappeared, closing the door quietly after himself. 

 

Darcy let out a sigh. She was grateful, of course she was - anything to be out of that tiny little apartment, filled to bursting with memories of Steve that hit her in the face every time she took a step within it - but she was exhausted. Dragging her t-shirt over her head and kicking off her pants, she pulled a shirt out of the box and immediately grimaced. 

 

“C’mon, give me a break here,” she muttered, holding up one of Steve’s checked shirts he must have left at her place. She sniffed at it, and pulled a face. It even still smelled like him, not - as Tony insisted at every opportunity - like freedom, but plain old Calvin Klein. She’d bought it him for Christmas, saved up week on week to afford the little bottle that had sat on the dresser his side of the bed. 

 

Darcy cast a glance at the box and could see that she had little other option for sleepwear without doing a laundry run. Sighing, she hauled it over her head, promising herself that first thing in the morning it was going to Goodwill, no matter how little she had to wear. 

 

\-------

 

She awoke with a start at the sound of the window opening, and scrabbled for the light. Feeling a heavy weight across her legs she fought against it harder, almost throwing herself across the bed in fear and groping madly at the little lamp on the bedside table to find the switch. 

 

Darcy managed to snap it on just as the door to her bedroom burst open, Barton stood in the doorway tensed and bow trained at her window. Lucky - the weight, she realised, that had been across her legs - stood over her with a growl and raised hackles at the figure sat in the window with one leg in the room and one out.

 

“Barton, it’s me,” Steve hissed, one arm hanging onto the window ledge and the other raised with his forearm shielding his face from the bright light. His gaze tripped to Darcy and back again, body defensive against the archer stood motionless in the door, framed by light. 

 

“Yeah, I know,” the archer replied with a minute shrug, not dropping his bow and still fixed upon Steve. “You okay, Darce?” This he addressed - without looking away - to the little brunette, huddled under the covers with her back pressed against the headboard and knees bent toward her chest. She nodded slowly, gaze moving between Steve and the archer. 

 

“Care to give us some privacy?” Steve said irritably, easing his other leg through the window with difficulty. Barton quirked an eyebrow in Darcy’s direction, waiting for her to nod again. She wondered, briefly, what exactly he’d do if she didn’t nod. She did, however, incline her head slowly, eyes on Steve as he was practically bent in two in the small window. 

 

Barton lowered the bow with a certain amount of reluctance, and backed up. 

 

“I’ll be in the living room,” he said, eyes running over Steve one final time before he shut the door carefully behind himself. He gave a low whistle and Lucky’s ears pricked - first one, then the other. The dog hesitated, looking between Barton and the intruder sat on the window ledge, but when Barton whistled again he hopped off the bed and trotted to the door. 

 

Darcy shot the archer a grateful smile as he left, and hugged her knees into her chest before turning her gaze back on the super soldier who’d managed to extricate himself from the window ledge and was now standing awkwardly at the foot of her bed. 

 

She sighed. 

 

“You really don't know how to deal with a relationship, do you?”

 

“Thought we didn't have a relationship,” he offered, with a crooked smile and an awkward push back through his hair that dishevelled it and made him look unfairly boyish.

 

“We don't,” she snapped back at him, anger rising up through her chest again like she’d never managed to calm it. “What we have is you pulling an Edward Cullen, which was creepy in a teen fiction novel and doesn't get any better when it's a full grown man climbing through a bedroom window in the middle of the night.”

 

“You weren't answering my calls,” he said, wisely opting to stay with his back pressed against the bedroom wall. Darcy wondered if he was aware how thin those walls were. There wasn't much fear of Barton listening in - he'd just take out his hearing aids and go to bed - but the rest of the apartment block was likely to be hanging on Steve's every word. 

 

She sighed again. 

 

“Because we broke up, Steve,” she said, running a tired hand through sleep tangled curls with her head tilted on one side looking at him. Darcy narrowed her eyes. “That's what happens. You don't get to call me anymore.”

 

He looked gratifyingly chastised by that, and she felt a vague sense of achievement at that. Let him suffer as much as was likely to touch him. He’d not been sleepwalking through his job, tormented by memories of their relationship, as she had. He’d not had to turn off his television for fear of throwing the remote through the screen because yet another damn commercial mentioned her name. 

 

“Anyway,” Darcy said, warming to her subject and crossing her arms over her chest and resolutely not looking at him. “You disappeared off the face of the earth.”

 

“I had a mission,” Steve said, plaintively, taking a step closer to the bed so that his knees were almost brushing against the edge of it. The blue of his eyes looked dark in the shadows that draped over the little bedroom, the small light at the bedside not doing a lot to drive them away. 

 

“You always have a mission,” she shot back instantly, refusing to be affected by his puppy-dog routine, whether he realised he was doing it or not. “There’s always something, Steve. And you know what? That’s okay. Or it would have been, if at least some of the time that something was us.”

 

He dropped his head to his chest, eyes dropping from hers. 

 

“But it never was,” she pressed on, desperate for him to finally get what she’d been feeling, how alone she’d been, a one-sided half of a barely-there relationship she’d so wanted to work. “I’m not a selfish person, but god - at least once you could have chosen us. Made us the important thing.”

 

“You’re my priority,” he mumbled. 

 

“How?” She exploded, sitting forward in the bed. “How the fuck, Steve?”

 

“I don’t know how to have a relationship,” he burst out, fists clenching at his sides and head snapping up to fix her with clear blue eyes that blazed with something she’d not seen in him - or, not seen him direct at her, at least. Steve visibly caught himself and reeled back, taking a step. He huffed out a breath before continuing. 

 

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said quietly, looking at the floor. “I am trying, I promise you that, Darcy, I am trying.” His head came up again and a look of guilt passed over his earnest face. A muscle twitched in his cheek as his jaw clenched, and Darcy could see almost every inch of his body was tensed. A small part of her wanted to crawl to the end of the bed and put her hands on, massage it away, rest her cheek against his chest and have him wrap his arms around her like he’d done before. 

 

She stayed put. 

 

“Sometimes I think the only thing I’m good at is fighting,” Steve said with the barest hint of dark laughter playing at the very edge of his words as he spoke. The corner of his lip curled up in a movement far removed from humour. He shook his head. “I’m a Captain. I’m only needed in war, right? So what do I do in peacetime.”

 

It was a rhetorical question, such as it was, and Darcy caught the sense that Steve’s thoughts ran a little deeper than just their relationship - or the tattered remains that were left of it, at any rate. She sat back again against the headboard, letting her legs cross in front of her. Steve glanced at her, then at the bed. 

 

“May I?” He asked, gesturing toward it. Darcy allowed him a one-shouldered shrug in return. He opted to accept it as a positive, and sank onto the bed just inches from her feet. Steve threaded his fingers together, hands clasped in his lap, and let his shoulders drop forward. Darcy, watching him, thought that he looked younger in that moment than she’d ever seen him.

 

“I love you.”

 

He said it simply, matter of factly, and his head was turned from her as he spoke. Darcy could see his face only in profile and her fingertips dug into her thighs through the covers as she fought the thump of her heart that it made in response. 

 

“I don’t expect anything of you, I just…” He trailed off, still focused on his own hands, laid in his lap. “I just thought you should know.”

 

It was Darcy’s turn to stretch a silence between them, and whilst one half of her battled to find the right words, to understand how she was reacting to his admission, the other half of her wondered how in the hell he was able to keep quiet usually. 

 

“Loving someone doesn’t make everything shitty go away,” she said, careful and cautious as she spoke. She thought that she was reminding herself of that fact just as much as she was telling it to him and the muscles that tensed in his back as the words tripped out of her. 

 

“I know that,” Steve said quietly, turning to her finally. “But I’m hoping it’s something to start with, at least.”


End file.
